Game (steam copy) crashes during the pre-cache

Got the game today and installed through steam. The pre-load runs, lots of text and the alpha warning sits there for about 20 seconds, but a few seconds after it gets to "pre-Caching objects" the game crashes hard, windows dialog pops up, etc.

I've run a re-validation through steam, it always finds 1 file that's corrupt, and it always replaces that one file, but next time I validate it always finds 1 file to replace again.

Comments

I am having a similar issue, but the non steam version. I would get to the Pre-Caching Objects and the game will crash. Ran to check for any new updates and that didn't help. Ran as Admin and that didn't work either.